AI stops attacking late in the game

[Tim James]

I'm not sure if this is a bug or what. It sounds vaguely familiar, like I've heard of it before. I spent 30 minutes searching but couldn't find anything.

I'm 6 hours into a game and the AI has stopped sending waves, counterattacking, etc. I even attacked a counterwave post and nothing showed up. Then a special forces alarm post triggered and my threat went up, but no attacks for a while now. It had probably been like that for 30 minutes before I noticed.

Now that I think of it, this happened in my last game when I was mustering outside of the second homeworld. I figured the AI was just terrified of me.

Is this a known issue? Is there any way to recover my game?

[EDIT] I loaded an old savegame from this campaign that was just before a cross planet attack. The threat sat there for a while, then I saved and quit. I loaded it back up and the AI started attacking at last. Then I loaded my latest save game and the threat (from the special forces alarm post) finally triggered. Is this just a bizarre coincidence or did I jump start something?

[Wingflier]

Can you give us some additional details about the situation?  What version of the game are you using?

Are you playing one of the expansions, or the original game?

Do you happen to have any of the "special settings" turned on?  Do you know which AI types you're facing?

Thanks in advance.

[Tim James]

I'm using 4.021. Both expansions enabled. See my edit above for more details. I'm going to go play for a while and see if the AI sends a wave. One AI is a Mad Bomber and I haven't seen a wave in quite a while.

[EDIT] Waves are back. One after another now, a few minutes apart. It's magic.

Does the game try to recover itself by refreshing things every time you load it? Otherwise this must have been one of those statistical outliers that seem like something is wrong.

[Fruden]

I'm using 4.021. Both expansions enabled. See my edit above for more details. I'm going to go play for a while and see if the AI sends a wave. One AI is a Mad Bomber and I haven't seen a wave in quite a while.

[EDIT] Waves are back. One after another now, a few minutes apart. It's magic.

Does the game try to recover itself by refreshing things every time you load it? Otherwise this must have been one of those statistical outliers that seem like something is wrong.

 When you're really sure you should be getting hit and you're not, save and reload will (should?) fix it. Somehow the ships are getting stuck doing nothing for some reason and when the game is loaded they are given new orders and start doing things again.

[Tim James]

When you're really sure you should be getting hit and you're not, save and reload will (should?) fix it. Somehow the ships are getting stuck doing nothing for some reason and when the game is loaded they are given new orders and start doing things again.

Okay thanks, that's exactly what I was wondering. Good to know.

[Lancefighter]

6 hours is late game? 

[x4000]

It sounds like the ai thread is crashing -- we fixed a few of those in the latest betas (you can turn off light of the spire if you don't want it), but you can also check for an aierrors file under your runtimedat folder in your game folder. If waves, etc, stop coming there's very little else it could be other than some sort of exception.

[Tim James]

There's about ten of them that look like this:

reference not set to an instance of an object
  at AIRouting.CreateStandardWaves (Int32 PlayerNumber, Int32 WaveArrivalTime, Int32 AIProgressionLevel, Int32 AITechLevel, FInt WaveSize, ForegroundObjectType ForcedType, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2 AiMods) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at AICommand.ParseDataIntoAILoop () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at AILoop.RunAILoop () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
11/14/2010 12:01:52 AM

Like I said, it's good to know this about the game for future reference. I will probably try the beta as soon as I finish off this campaign.

[x4000]

If you have a save that can reproduce this, that would be very helpful, but I put in a couple of checks to hopefully help with this.  We'll see!

[Winter Born]

If you have a save that can reproduce this, that would be very helpful, but I put in a couple of checks to hopefully help with this.  We'll see!

Is there a resonable way to alert the player ingame, or upon loading, or exiting that there are new entries in error files?

[x4000]

Most of the time we do that already, but with stuff from the AI thread it's trickier because of cross-threading concerns.  I do need to put in something like that at some point for the AI thread, but now isn't the time.  Do you mind putting that in mantis?

[Winter Born]

NP

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=1377

[x4000]

Thanks!